FLEXING NEW MUSCLE: SLAV SIREN TO PLAY MATA HARI

FLEXING NEW MUSCLE: SLAV SIREN TO PLAY MATA HARI

FEATURES

Cynthia Rose

Marlene Premilovich—professionally, Lene Lovich—has been out of the musical limelight for awhile, since the January 1980 release of Flex and a subsequent tour of Ireland, America and Europe (including her ancestral Yugoslavia). She did only two live turns this summer: both on the stage of London’s Venue, helping a visiting Tom Verlaine with sax and co-vocals on “Postcard From Waterloo.”

And though her famous locks streamed down unbound (revealing a cascade of colors from blonde through auburn to black) over a plain dress, Lene was rapturously recognized by one and all—bar a couple of music critics.

This October, after two years of confusions and re-evaluation, Lene’s putting her revitalized energies and hard-won equilibrium to the service of something completely different: a London stage musical about Dutch adventuress Mata Hari (executed as a spy under somewhat dubious circumstances on October 15, 1917).

Lene is co-authoring her project with longtime partner Les Chappell and old friend Chris Judge Smith (a founder-member of Van Der Graaf Gerterator who donated two tracks to Flex and authored a previous musical—about mountain climbing). “It’s an odd sequence of events,” she explains. “Chris had been commissioned to write a treatment for a film about Mata Hari four years ago. Then he was in the studio when we were doing backing vocals when he’d just finished and he let me read it. Then I forgot about the whole thing until the beginning of this year when I saw his musical.” Chris also showed Lene a portrait of Mata Hari, in her homemade performance costume. The notorious “ex-

"There's a great pressure to be processed today. I don't think it needs to be tike that at alt."

otic dancer” also sported near knee-length braids, topped with large bunches of flowers. “Imagine my surprise!” says Lene.

I met Lene and Les for lunch, before they set off to interview one of several directors' competing for their musical. In her usual fashion-bandit couture (four or five skimpy patterned skirts, a leather jerkin with.rolled collar, plus a knot jumper shot through with gold lurex and topped by an embroidered Tyrolean jacket), Lene looks right at home; Les sports a two o’clock snadow on the barnet Gillette once tried to recruit for a razor blade testimonial.

The pair seem glad to sit down after bouncing from studio to studio (the Kinks’ Konk and Visconti’s Good Earth) in their efforts to complete a third album for autumn release. Lene would like it to be called No Man’s Land...a not inappropriate title for her state-of-the-heart since the beginning of 1981—all that time during which other musicians have been citing her talents as a major influence.

Beware of their promise —believe what /say ,

... They paint a pretty picture

And they tell you that they need you;

And they cover you with flowers and they

Always keep you dreaming; they always keep you dreaming,

You won’t have a lonely hour...

But the night begins to turn your head around

And you know you’re going to lose more than you found

—“The Night”, Flex, January 1980 ☆ ☆ ☆

Lene Lovich expatriate Detroiter and one-time sculptress at London’s Central College Of Art where she met Les Chappell—came to Stiff stardom via DJ Charlie Gillett’s Oval Exiles scheme of 1977. Gillett sponsored her first demo (“I Think We’re Alone Now”), then handed it on to Stiff founder Dave Robinson.

Formally, Lene is still signed to Gillett’s Oval label, but licensed to Stiff. “Oval survived because of the money we made from ‘Lucky Number’,” says Gillett today. “But I get the feeling that Lene thinks if she came back to us I’d need her to do something else. Which isn’t the case, since we are self-sufficient now.”

Like other tans of Lene’s 1978 Stateless, Charlie Gillett feels less than convinced about Flex. “When she first came to us, she was so up in every sense. She giggled a lot, and as soon as she started performing, she was electric. She stands by the second album, but if I’ve had a disappointment in what she’s done with her music it’s that she’s abandoned that effervescent side of herself for something more moody and introspective.”

Sipping Perrier water through fuschia lips, Lene (whose startling light blue gaze is as frank as her carefully modulated speech) describes her homecoming from the last tour which marketed her “effervescence.”

“When we got back we had a lot of looking at our lives time. We stopped throwing ourselves around and it was the first time I’d stopped since signing with Stiff. It was beginning to be very difficult to see the future.” ,

“You see, it was a bit of a shock traveling around—not staying in posh places but, like, having a reasonable roof over your head—then coming back to a rathole in Hackney. I mean (sne laughs) I’m no snob, but after awhile it gets up your nose to see other people making money out of you and then find yourself back where you started with no better facilities to do what TURN TO PAGE 59 you want.”

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“I got really wound up at the injustice of it; I thought, I have to think of some way to see a future because I’m going to die just like this—constantly on the same treadmill, just wrecking myself. Because I haven’t made any money out of this, not at all. And it wasn’t fun envisaging having .to kind of crawl on your hands and knees to get stuff recorded...”.

“Purely by luck,” as Lene puts it, some money suddenly materialized from the LPs by French disco artist Cerrone (“Supernature” was a Lovich idea) for whom she had penned lyrics in 76. Lene and Les used the funds to establish a base in Norfolk, and there they have half-completed a 16-track studio of their own.

Charlie Gillett verifies the Cerrone saga: “Sure, he was just making the music and presenting it to Lene for lyrics, then he just credited her as a translator.” Gillett’s own impression wasthat “Lene is particularly good at writing to order.” (Upon hearing the original two-minute “Lucky Number,” D?we Robinson told Lene to “go home, write an extra verse and a B-side.” She did—and the Stateless LP which followed was a similar case, with all its songs penned in a month. “Marvelous stuff,” says Robinson, “written at the rate of one or two a week”).

It was Gillett, though, who first encouraged Lene to sing—against her original feelings and the advice of those around her. Today with extraordinary and honest female vocalizing from the likes of Diamanda Galas and Yoko Ono attracting so much press, that athleticism of the heart with which Lene sings seems at last a logical influence.

“It’s hard to know what to say about that,” comments Lene herself, “I feel what I do is just...different from what anybody else does with their voice. I really don’t like the idea of segregating men and girls, i don’t feel one way or the other about that. But it’s always been very spiritually uplifting when other people mention me because it makes me feel I do exist in this music business which, as far as I can see, is often totally anti-music.”

“There’s always been a tendency to remove the ones who are ‘different’” she continues. “Yet—that’s the only way to progress, when you feel strongly. I mean, for most of us,: it’s not an aim to be ‘different’. Really I’m only just discovering my voice—but I can’t ignore what wants to be heard.”

“It goes beyond any idea of making a living. It’s something which has hung over me for most of my life, that I just can’t ignore myself.”

The innate exuberance of that self has caused problems with those who assume the Lovich intentions are gimmicky or theatrical. Lene sees the Mata Hari musical : (in which she will sing, not speak, and will address only the audience and not other members of the cast) as “a different adventure...because I’m not really the theatrical person people make me out to be. What I do musically, it’s expressive, but I’m not acting at all apd I really don’t know if I have any talent for acting as such. In a way this will be like an opera, without the musical conversations—I just express what’s supposed to be going on in my mind.”

The Gillett-Stiff team have always seen Lene as an actress, however; Gillett sent her to see film director Brian Gibson when his embryonic Breaking Glass still starred a boy. Lene auditioned for the secondary role of a girlfriend, and Gibson was so impressed he rewrote the whole film around a feihale lead.

“I figured,” says Lene slowly, “OK—I could do it. But I was just beginning to get involved in music and I thought I would confuse myself. They did try everything to get me in that film; they used some really horrible emotional blackmail.” Though she’s never seen the finished film, Lene concedes she thought it was “right” for Hazel O’Connor: “I would have taken the film a whole different way; it wouldn’t have worked.”

Nevertheless, upon her return to the U.K., she was surprised to find O’Connor flogging a pathetically bastardized version of her own sound. “Part of the reason she turned down the film,” contends Charlie Gillett, “was Dave Robinson wanting her to undertake this mega-tour just at that time; and since she became such a big influence in America it would hardly be right for me to say she made a wrong decision.”

“But I certainly think it contributed to her confusion to come back and find this person with absolutely no talent cashing in through cloned Lene Lovich songs—even to another number called “Writing On The Wall’.

“I think it totally froze her as far as songwriting.”

A major encouragement to Lene, however, was her unexpected working relationship with Tqm Verlaine. In New York for just a few days while he was giving

interviews about Dreamtime, Lene noticed Verlaine had mentioned her name. She went to see him at Club Left, and they spoke briefly backstage.

“I’d always felt a kind of affinity with him—which is difficult to explain because on the surface we seem worlds apart. I had n«ver heard him live, never even seen a picture of him. But when we talked, something came out, something showed through. It’s difficult to pinpoint these things because they’re unspoken, you either feel right with someone’s work or you don’t.”

“Anyway, a lot of time went past one day he called me-fron New York; he was making ‘Words From The Front” and had as idea I’d like to play sax on it. So—I answered the call!” She smiles. “It was kind of like ‘whatever I am, he’s it too.’ We outsiders have to stick together!”

Lene pauses—her dark conglomeration of lace, black braids, curtain rings and Victorian curling rags bent thoughtfully, low over her lunch. “There’s a great pressure to be processed today, and I don’t know quite what to say about it because it goes round and round in my head and affects my life and upsets me. I don’t think it needs to be like that at all—what you can do can be as acceptable as what other people tell you you should do.”

“But often the people you’re trying the hardest to be honest with are those who have your best interests least at heart. People shouldn’t have to want to suffer... But when you want to something, you often have to go through such an odd, difficult time, you risk changing without even realizing it>”

At a time when full-blooded female singing about feeling couldn’t be more “in vogue” and the saxophone is inarguably the instrument of the day in her adopted homeland, Ms. Lovich seems perfectly able to continue weathering the vicissitudes of fashion—thanks to the fact that her faith is firmly rooted in the inexhaustible potential of the imagination.

Also because—like truly individual artists since time immemorial—she and Mr. Chappell are adamant about going their own way and learning from their own mistakes.